How to Fake a Passport

By Jeff Goodell

Published: February 10, 2002

Alain Boucar flips open a passport and holds it under an ultraviolet light. A background image of Belgium's royal palace, faintly printed on the page, vanishes. ''See that?'' he says. He holds another Belgian passport under the spooky purple light. The image on this one is printed in a special reactive ink. It glows brightly. ''The first one's a complete counterfeit,'' he announces.

Boucar is the director of the antifraud unit for the Belgian federal police. A genial 44-year-old, he works in a small, plain office in Brussels that is strewn with dozens of passports. It's only 10 a.m., but it has already been a busy day -- there has been an urgent call from an Interpol agent in Berlin, and another from a security officer on a Dutch cruise ship. Each wanted information from Boucar about suspicious Belgian passports. Every few minutes, a uniformed cop wanders through with a question about a suspect document. ''No good,'' he says with disgust upon being handed an Italian ID card. Lousy fakes annoy Boucar; they are not worthy of his connoisseur's eye.

Boucar's colleague Thierry Descamps steps into his office. He is holding a fax. Descamps nods to the phone and mentions the name of a Belgian police officer on the antiterrorism task force.

Boucar grabs the phone and his face becomes suddenly serious -- the inner cop emerges. While Boucar listens on the phone, he turns to his computer and calls up a database nicknamed Braingate, which is the Belgian police's repository of 1.4 million stolen and fraudulent documents from all over the world. The antiterrorism cop is calling about two Sri Lankans, Nicolas Sebastianpillai and Varunalingam Arudthevan, who were arrested in Faro, Portugal, on Sept. 12, en route to New York. They were traveling on Belgian passports -- stolen ones, that is. (Portuguese security detected a fake stamp on their passports and contacted the Belgian police, who found the passport numbers in Braingate.) Interpol investigators soon began aggressively pursuing suspected links between the men and the Tamil Tigers, the violent Sri Lankan terrorist group. Now the antiterrorism cop wants to know how they got their hands on these Belgian passports.

Boucar punches in the numbers of the passports confiscated by the police in Portugal: EC 503103 and EC 503104. Boucar learns that these two passports were stolen in March, in transit from Belgium to Madagascar: a batch of 25 blank passports was lifted out of a supposedly secure diplomatic pouch. Of all forms of passport fraud, this is one of the most frightening. Only the very best counterfeits make it past airport security. But authentic blank passports, when filled out correctly, are extremely difficult to detect. Virtually the only way to trip up a person traveling on an authentic passport is if he makes an error filling it out or if the passport number turns up in a database of stolen documents. That's why Braingate is so invaluable; without it, the Sri Lankans might well have made it all the way to New York.

Boucar searches Braingate for more information. He tells the cop on the other end of the line that he can find no evidence that the other 23 passports stolen in the same batch have been used by terrorists -- or anyone else, for that matter. Of course, that doesn't mean they haven't been, Boucar tells me. It just means nobody has been caught yet trying to use them. In fact, they have almost surely been sold on the black market, providing two dozen fresh opportunities for terrorists to sneak across international borders.

These 23 passports, Boucar admits, are hardly the only Belgian passports circulating on the black market. In fact, his country has quietly become the global capital of identity fraud. According to the Belgian police, 19,050 blank Belgian passports have been stolen since 1990. This is probably some kind of record, although other problem countries, like Italy, Argentina and South Africa, refuse to confirm numbers.

All these Belgian passports were not stolen in a few grand heists. Rather, small stashes were grabbed from various town halls, embassies, consulates and honorary consulates. Sold on the black market for as much as $7,500, they have subsequently been used by human traffickers, sex traffickers, gun runners and drug dealers, not to mention terrorists.

Indeed, for terrorists making excursions outside the Middle East, Belgian passports are often the document of choice. Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, trafficked in a number of false passports, at least one of which was linked to a theft from a town hall in Belgium. And the two members of a Qaeda cell who assassinated the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud just before Sept. 11 traveled from Brussels to London to Karachi on stolen Belgian passports.

Until this fall, Belgium's passport troubles were little noticed. The Massoud murder, however, exposed the country's problem to the world. It was a huge embarrassment for a small, chronically insecure country that has been working hard to cast itself as one of the economic and political capitals of the New Europe. After Sept. 11, Belgian investigators immediately began tracking down clues. The passports used by the Massoud assassins, Boucar discovered, were stolen in two separate break-ins: one at the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg, France, on June 26, 1999, when 45 passports were stolen, and another a few months later, on Nov. 11, 1999, when 20 were stolen from the Belgian Embassy in The Hague.